Texas just made the autonomous vehicle industry a little more legible to the rest of us, and the numbers are worth a hard look. A new tracking tool from the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles — born out of a state law that took effect May 28 — now requires any company testing or deploying AVs in Texas to register their fleets and disclose basic safety information. The result? The first real, publicly accessible snapshot of who's actually putting autonomous vehicles on Texas roads, and how many.

Spoiler: it's mostly Waymo.

The Scoreboard, As It Stands

Alphabet's Waymo has registered 577 autonomous vehicles in the state. That's not a close race. Avride comes in second with 317, Nuro sits at 47, and Tesla — the company that has been loudly proclaiming robotaxi dominance since roughly 2016 — has registered a grand total of 42 vehicles. Volkswagen's MOIA subsidiary rounds out the passenger-vehicle side with 12 electric autonomous microbuses.

Let that Tesla number sink in for a second. Elon Musk launched a robotaxi service in Austin last summer, then announced expansions to Dallas and Houston. The fleet count publicly registered with the state: 42 vehicles. Waymo, which launched commercially in Austin back in March 2025 before expanding to Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, has nearly 14 times that count. That's not a gap — that's a canyon.

What Fleet Size Actually Tells You (And What It Doesn't)

Before you declare winners and losers based purely on registration numbers, pump the brakes a little. Raw fleet counts are an imperfect proxy for competitive standing. Nuro and Zoox, for instance, aren't running commercial operations — they're in testing phases, so their smaller numbers reflect strategy, not failure. And even registered vehicles aren't necessarily active vehicles; Waymo itself temporarily paused operations in some Texas cities this month after its systems struggled to handle flood conditions. Turns out teaching a neural network to navigate standing water is a harder problem than the press releases suggest.

Still, for companies running commercial robotaxi services — which both Waymo and Tesla claim to be doing — fleet size matters. You can't scale rides without vehicles on the road, and right now the gap between Waymo's deployment footprint and Tesla's is embarrassingly wide for a company that regularly trades on its self-driving narrative.

Don't Sleep on the Trucking Side

The DMV tracker doesn't stop at robotaxis. Self-driving trucks are in there too, and that side of the ledger has its own interesting dynamics. Aurora, which went commercial with driverless trucking in May 2025, leads with 91 registered trucks. Gatik AI — focused on mid-sized autonomous delivery trucks — has 64. Kodiak AI and Waabi trail with 33 and 13 respectively.

Autonomous trucking tends to fly under the radar compared to the robotaxi circus, but it's arguably the more tractable near-term commercial problem. Highways are more predictable than city streets, routes are more structured, and the economic case for eliminating a driver on a long-haul run is brutally clear. Aurora going commercial first and leading the registration count isn't an accident.

Why This Data Actually Matters

The real value of Texas's new AV tracker isn't the current snapshot — it's the trend data it will generate over time. Right now it's a single data point. In a year, it becomes a growth curve. Who's scaling? Who's stalled? Whose "expansion" announcements are backed by actual vehicle registrations and whose are backed by press releases and vibes?

That kind of ground-truth accountability is exactly what this industry has needed for years. Too much of the AV narrative has been driven by company announcements, carefully curated demo videos, and benchmark claims that conveniently elide real-world edge cases — flooded roads, construction zones, the general chaos of human drivers doing unpredictable things.

A public registry won't fix everything. It doesn't track miles driven, disengagement rates, or how many times a vehicle did something weird and nobody filed a report. But it's a start. And right now, the start looks like Waymo with a very comfortable lead and Tesla with a lot of explaining to do.